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Stoney

Devmania and a Pascal game

So, me and some teammates of mine from Incognita Studios were at the Devmania in Mainz, Germany this week-end.
What is Devmania you might ask? It is a get-together for german independent game developers which lasted about 24 hours beginning Saturday 2 pm local time. Besides having project presentations and talks they organisators were also hosting an overnight contest in which an entry had to incorporate the theme moonlight. We had about 18 hours to complete a game. We started with Processing.js, a Java-like language based on Javascript HTML5 Canvas where you use classes and inheritance with your keywords like class and extends. But wait, this is supposed to be about Pascal, right? Allright, to speed up things up a little, the syntax and style of Processing.js is great, the debugging not so great to say the least. So the more stuff we kept adding to our game the slower it began to perform with bounding box collision finally being the death sentence to the performance. Even the latest WebKit JavaScript engine showed some serious lags.
With now 12 hours spent on debugging... pardon developing with Processing.js (don't get me wrong: I still like Processing and Processing.js), the results were not quite what we expected to see and only about six hours left on the clock we were faced with a difficult choice: Give up? Never. So we redid the whole game with FreePascal and Lazarus using my game framework I've been working on nearly half a decade and which I've been using for school projects and especially my Ludum Dare entries. The game is functional and has most of the features we wanted in the game, but it still suffers from a few bugs and is in need of polishing and balancing, but basically what we did in just six hours is pretty cool.

You have two zombies and two sperate screens of the game. You need the lead the way for the zombies who only react to moonlight which is evidently on your cursor. You can switch between two modes: Either use one light cone to move only one zombie around and leave the other one completely unprotected or use two light cones to control both zombies at the same time.
But be careful along your way to reach the castles: There are traps, fireballs and even the castles are hostile to you and are shooting arrows in your direction.

Here is a screenshot of the game:

Graphics by Artur Sch?štz (the zombies are even animated ), Coding by Jesse Klugmann and me

Thanks for reading my first blog post on PGD. Leave a comment if you liked it and there may be more coming in that case.